Solving Anagrams with Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

"Given some sequence of letters, an anagram is formed by changing their order to create a different text. In a historical context, anagrams were popular mainly as puzzles, but they are also connected to classical transposition ciphers. To solve an anagram means to rearrange the letter sequence to a form that is acceptable as a word or sentence in some language.

In this article, we formalize the anagram solving problem. We focus on anagrams based on a simplified language model based on fixed dictionaries. We study the applicability of known methods for this problem. We propose a method of anagram solving based on integer linear programming. The new method is not strictly superior to existing methods but provides new tools to tackle the problem. The new representation shows potential for integration with Word2Vec representation of words for finding potentially meaningful anagrams in natural languages."